Chameleon Street
This week the From Below is showing Wendell B. Harris’ *Chameleon Street (1989) *on *Thursday, October 2 *at *7pm. *
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the film at 7:10!
Wendell Harris writes, directs, edits, and stars in his satirical experimental biography of notorious scammer and impersonator, William Douglas Street, Jr. Street racked up an unbelievable list of imposterships, which included professional athletes, lawyers, and a surgeon, disturbingly performing 36 actual hysterectomies in a hospital in Detroit. To make the film, Harris struck up a relationship with Street, interviewing him over the course of four years while Street did time in a Michigan prison for various scams.
In a perhaps trite but useful shorthand, this film feels like some kind of mixture of the films *F is for Fake and Catch Me if You Can *with the psychoanalytic attention to racialization of Ralph Ellison’s *Invisible Man *and Frantz Fanon’s *Black Skin, White Masks. *As I argued for Kathleen Collins’ *Losing Ground, *this film is a major contribution to the philosophical corpus of Black existentialist thought. Mimesis, performance, race, class, and gender all get examined through Harris’ playful, anti-heroric impersonation of an impersonator.
Even after winning Sundance in 1990, the film lay undistributed in a meaningful way for decades and suffered under a slew of negative write-ups. *Chameleon Street *is Harris’ first and last film, his career mostly spent in fruitless toil trying to get recognition and distribution for his work. It’s only very recently paying off, with the film receiving a 4k restoration in 2021 and a seat on the digital shelves of Tubi and Criterion. Yet I think to call this film “overlooked” is an understatement. Words like suppressed, ignored, and marginalized capture more honestly the ways in which Wendell Harris and his work was categorically excluded. I’ll leave account you with this charming account of the scrappy DIY gusto to produce this film.
Masquerading as yours, Stefan, Charlie, and Stark